Hyderabad: Although corporate colleges/institutes boast of thousands of their students qualifying in the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE) — Mains and Advanced, it turns out that less than 40 per cent of the students actually make it to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Somehow, this figure never makes it to the public sphere.
With about 13,000 seats available in the IITs, only 37.39 per cent of the students who passed the JEE-Advanced last year made it into the various IITs across the country. This year, about 2.45 lakh students have qualified in the JEE-Mains and will be appearing for the JEE-Advanced on 27th May.
“Education has turned into a money-making business. Coaching institutes have been showcasing the large numbers of students that qualify under their guidance to lure parents into investing lakhs into preparing their children for the entrance examinations, when in reality, not all who qualify make it to the IITs. Unfortun-ately, this fact has been kept buried all this while,” said the IIT JEE Forum Convenor Mr K. Lalith Kumar. He added that ranks should not be equated with seats for eventually, not over 50,000 students make it to the IITs and NITs (National Institute of Technology).
About 3,802 students from Andhra Pradesh and 3,788 from Telangana state had qualified in the JEE-Advanced in 2017. However, only 882 from Andhra Pradesh and 833 from Telangana state managed to attain placement in the IITs.
While the major factor for this discrepancy is the limited availability of seats, experts claim that a large number of students prefer institutes other than the
IITs either owing to the distance of its nearest campus from their hometown or due to the lack of availability of seats in the course that they might desire to pursue.
With the introduction of the percentile rating this year, the JEE-Main has become even more challenging. Surpri-singly however, despite the rising competition, an increasing number of seats have been found to remain vacant in the IITs over the past 5 years. With 15 vacant seats in 2013, 3 in 2014, 39 in 2015, 96 in 2016, and 121 vacant seats in 2017, the trend is fairly obvious.
According to an official document from the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), courses such as pharmaceutical, mining, ceramic, chemical, and mechanical engineering find the highest number of vacant seats. Experts attributed this observation to the lack of market opportunities related to the aforementioned courses. The ministry has put together a committee in this regard to analyse the reasons and make improvements wherever feasible.
